Is It Bad for SEO to Use a Subdomain for Your Blog?

The topic of SEO seems to be top of mind for just about everyone we work with. There is a lot of good information available about SEO (like our SEO Cheat Sheet, for example!) but unfortunately, there are still some myths circulating. One of the more divisive myths is the "subdomain vs. subfolder" argument.

What Does That Even Mean?

There are some STRONGOPINIONS about this issue! Who knew? For those of you who aren't sure what subdomains or subfolders are, let's back up a bit and fill in the blanks.

Subfolders

There are a couple of ways to host a corporate blog on your website. One way is to place it under a subfolder (aka subdirectory) on your website. For example, if SpinWeb went this route, our blog would live at the address "www.spinweb.net/blog". This works fine, and it's usually how things are set up if your blog platform is part of your website CMS.

Subfolder Pros

One Site for Everything — This is appealing if you've got one main domain that feeds the inbound links from the domain itself. Additionally, you only have to pay hosting fees for one site. (So if you're particularly budget concious, this might appeal to you.)

Category Control — If you're particularly interested in arranging your categories in a certain way, a subfolder could be your best friend. The URL path is friendlier for searchers, too.

Build Credibility — In theory, keeping all of your content contained in one place will lend you an air of authority. Google treats subfolders as a part of the same site, while subdomains are treated as entirely different websites.

Subfolder Cons

Time Suck — The more pages the URL contains, the rougher the subfolder setup. Additionally, the maintenance time required is more intensive.

Diluted Exposure — If search results are already jam-packed with other pages from your site, it might be tougher to get the exposure you're hoping for.

Subdomains

If your blog is hosted on a different platform than your website (such as HubSpot, for example) then you might find it easier to set up a subdomain (called a CNAME) like "blog.spinweb.net" or "info.spinweb.net/blog" to host your blog. If you look up at your address bar right now, you'll see that our blog is indeed hosted at "blog.spinweb.net" because it is hosted on HubSpot.

Subdomain Pros

Keyword-Heavy URL — Sure, it doesn't make any sense to shoehorn certain keywords into your website's main URL, so a subdomain will give you the opportunity to pop them into your domain. Boom.

Respect My (Niche) Authority — Subdomains are ideal for ranking and building authority in a smaller, niche market—and this will only help you beef up your main domain's authority, too.

Pump Up Search Results — The more subdomains, the more chances you have to appear in search engines.

Subdomain Cons

No Gravy — When your subdomain is separate from your main domain, you won't benefit from any of the trickle-down from the main site.

Fight Club — With separate domains, it's possible that they could be treated as competitors by search engines.

Why Can't We Be Friends?

Here's the issue: many people still think this makes a difference in your SEO strategy. They get all up in arms when they see blogs hosted on a subdomain and claim that the SEO Gods will punish your website for comitting such a tragic offense. They explain that the magical SEO juice will not "flow to your primary domain" and that this will hurt your search engine rankings.

Many years ago, way back when the Internet was ruled by the machines and Google was a mindless robot, making a choice between subdomain and subfolder may have been a life-or-death issue.

(And I'm being a bit dramatic. For fun.)

If you're now worried that you're doing it wrong, whether you're Team Subdomain or Team Subfolder, we've got good news for you: it really doesn't matter.

Google is smart enough to see both www.spinweb.net and blog.spinweb.net as tied to the same website.

But don't take my word for it. Let's hear it from Matt Cutts, head of Google's Webspam team.

As you can see, it justdoesn't matter to Google. As we stated above, there are pros and cons to both options, so you should simply do whatever works best for you and your company.

So what does matter? Content.

Many people obsess over all the technical or old-school aspects of SEO, like keyword density, subdomain myths and other highly technical and outdated concerns.

You're better off simply making sure your website is built and coded correctly, and then creating great content.

Is it really that simple? Well, no, not exactly, but we don't want to see people getting lost in the weeds of SEO theory. Of course it's a good idea to pay attention to details (that's a big part of our job at SpinWeb), but the brunt of your effort should be focused on your content strategy. Google's latest update, called Penguin, has refined the search engine's emphasis on content even more and helped weed out the "technical SEO" players in favor of those focusing on great content.

So the bottom line is, host your blog in whatever way is most convenient for you. Then you can forget about it and get on with the work of building a great digital marketing strategy fueled by great content. Stay out of the crossfire of the SEO wars, and concentrate on content instead.

This is great news for me. I have about twenty (yes, that's right) or so subdomains and this is largely because I use the same domain to direct numerous search queries right to the source - see http://ehealth.earnsocially.com as an example. I looked up subdomains and SEO to confirm I was correct that these numerous subdomains were indeed an asset and not a handicap in terms of search and ended up at this article. Great stuff! You guys can get rid of my other comment - there's a typo and I used the wrong link example.

It depends on what you want to use your blog for. If you are after seriously making money online, WordPress is the better platform. Blogger is more for personal blogs and non-serious marketing stuff. This is because Blogger has a lot of limited functions, something you don't want to experience if you want to make money online.

This is a good news as we are running our blog on sub-domain and we knew that it has few drawbacks but after seeing this video of Matt Cutts, now we are clear that it is not going to have any impacts as such. Thanks for sharing.

This information is good for all sub-domain blogging sites owner to simplify their confusions for their sub-domain blog, after seeing Matt Cutts this video. Thanks for the sharing this information.

Mister

I'm pretty sure all of the subdomains on wordpress.com are treated differently. In fact, do the special search site:subdomain.wordpress.com for any known subdomains and you'll see just the results from that subdomain while a similar search on spinweb.net will show you content from all subdomains.
It's true, for most small sites with just a couple subdomains for their blog, pr, and investor relations, it doesn't matter. For sites with multi-user setups like worpress.com, different subdomains are absolutely treated differently. Most multi-user ecom sites, like ebay or etsy, choose to go with subfolders. Most content sites and blogs, tumblr or wordpress, tend to go with subdomains. There is a reason, and despite what Matt Cutts has to say, it's still real. Do a test right now in 2014 and you'll see the difference.

Angus,
Thanks for sharing that resource. It is interesting and I do see a good argument here for subfolders but it still doesn't strike me as "definitive". I wonder if there are other factors that contributed to the results seen by Moz?

From as far as i can see using Sub-domains to create back-links will give you a single domain pointer to your website
for example
my website is www.softnax.com
and i create a sub-domain website web.wordpress.org
Google will crawl the site and will consider all the back-links as if they were from wordpress.org
so if you create 10 sub-domain websites of the same Domain all of the back-links will be considered of the same website.
for more information feel free to visit my website
www.softnax.com
Regards.

Have to disagree with you on that - http://moz.com/community/q/moz-s-official-stance-on-subdomain-vs-subfolder-does-it-need-updating and http://moz.com/blog/subdomains-vs-subfolders-rel-canonical-vs-301-how-to-structure-links-optimally-for-seo-whiteboard-friday

Wes,
Yep. I've seen those articles but there are many factors at play. There are also plenty more examples to the contrary. My take on it is that most people obsess over it too much rather than focusing on the other factors that matter more. That seems to be Google's take on it, as well.

Instead of buying different domains for different niche that i blog, I used sub-domain to save on yearly domain expenses and it works just fine.

Joslyn Erickson

I'm curious about this simply because when an entire site is hosted by wordpress.com it seems as though themes that are turned off for the good of the entire site cannot be turned back on just for the /blog site. This leads to a boring looking blog if specifics aren't allowed, hence the thought I had of moving it to blog.site.com simply to have more flexibility within wordpress and blogging. Thoughts?

Hi, Joslyn!
I'm afraid I don't have enough experience with WordPress to answer your question but in general I'm in favor of using subdomains when it makes things easier (and this seems to be Google's recommendation, as well).

Thanks for the article. Would there be any different with the site bounce rate if you use subdomain or subfolder? I would think that using subfolder will help decrease the bounce rate as the visitor will still be counted on the same site.

I was wondering which method was better this article explains both work fine , I am still going with subdomain.example.com model on my directory listing website for classifieds and business directory individual subdomains. Let's see whether it works or not.

I don't know about Bing, but Google absolutely treats different subdomains as completely seperate site. Your rank on blog.site.com will not effect - negatively or positively - your rank on www.site.com.
You also cannot even create one dashboard to see the information of www.site.comlog.site.com as if it was one entity.
There is no myth or mystery. This is all clearly stated on webmaster tools FAQ and help pages.

My company is working on adding a blog to our ecommerce store, and we've spent a ridiculous amount of time trying to figure out if we can use a subdomain without losing any SEO power (because that's why were adding the blog...) and FINALLY someone with a valid source (I would say Matt C is a good source ;)).
Thanks so much! Definitely cleared up some headaches on my end.

Joe

Hey Ryan,
How did this work out for you? I'm curious if you think adding as a subdomain was the right choice in hindsight. Is the blog performing well?
Thanks!

Thank you for this good article!
I was wondering about the best domain and sub-domain structure for creating a blog of a website.
So, the rank of a sub-domain by google will not effect the rank of domain itself, and does not make difference.

Thanks for your article, do you have any comment on the MOZ Friday Whitepaper stating that it does make a difference in tests. I am concerned because we spend a lot of effort on our blog but its on a subdomain as we are hosting the blog on Rackspace Cloud and the main site is in our internal server farm. We do not want to install wordpress on our our internal server farm for security reasons.

Hi, Dan!
Yes, I have seen Moz's tests and I don't really have anything to compare it to. We've maintained a great blog for years and have enjoyed ever-increasing rankings so I do know that what we do (with a subdomain) is working. I figure if you can't trust Matt Cutts who can you trust :)

Great Article,
But I am little bit confused on one thing.
Is it possible to have several links of sub domain on every page of main domain?
E.g If a user searches any query on main domain a link to sub domain is also there for his query Is it possible? And dose it make any affect on SEO.
Thank you

You're totally right about the importance of content strategy, but you know that when you are a webmaster, you really can't ignore some details like setting up the blog on subdomain or subforlder. Yer, you're probably right that it shouldn't have so much effect on SEO, but people want to pay attention to every bit of details to imptove their seo. Can't blame them!

It is always a good idea to have a sub domain for your site if you have a network of sites or more then two. Because you do not have to pay for every domain as all the sites are under single domain. Other thing is that your domain will be seen as authority site if you have good unique content in all the sites . So I never mind to use subdomains on my main domain .
Thanks

Subdomain would get link juice/ link advantage from the parent domain. Sub domains are a lot easier to manage and updates as compared to subfolders. For a multi language website, it is always advisable to use sub domain for different language.

This post puts another myth related to SEO to rest. There are numerous sites that make use of subdomains and they will be happy to know that they are not hurting their strategy by doing so. Thank you for sharing.

I'm certain she's so exceptionally grateful you helped her with this and I can't ever envision having more than one site to stay aware of so I'm certain she's extremely excited with her choice. Since the numbers don't look too far-removed it seems like it was the right move to make.

It is always a good idea to have a sub domain for your site if you have a network of sites or more then two. Because you do not have to pay for every domain as all the sites are under single domain. Other thing is that your domain will be seen as authority site if you have good unique content in all the sites . So I never mind to use subdomains on my main domain .

many of the top sites using the subdomains and they are still spamming with keyword stuffing and internal related keywords linking , but they are ranking high on google , this is why they are ranking high ,one of the example is softonic.com it show the chrome browser like
https://chrome.en.softonic.com/
but they still ranking high in search engines .
if this concept is right i have many ideas to build sites which ranker higher

Your article is exceptionally useful for me and for others as well. It is extremely enlightening in light of the fact that it expressed the tips about search engine optimization and the subdomains of it and does it affect it or not. Awesome article. So I thank you for sharing your own particular thoughts regarding this idea. Thanks a lot!

Hi,
So, this means that if we publish different articles to Blogs under the wordpress or Blogger platform they will be all interpreted as the same Domain articles for Link Juice purposes for Google?
So doing guest-posts in external blogs should always be done outsite the blog's platforms? OR can Google understand that these are different sites under the blog platform?
Thanks!
Miguel

Thank you Michael. great article and it explains everything about subdomains. The scary part about using subdomain is, it might be considered as a totally separate website, which is not preferable in my case. Also at the end of the day I would love to save some money. So I will not be using subdomains. Thanks again for the information.

Thanks a lot Michael. It was a great read. I want to setup wordpress niche blog and I wanted to host it on subdomain as my main domain too has a how to focused blog. Now I will go with subdomain. Thank you :)

Nice article. I got it clear from this article that the gap between domains and sub domains is very little from the view point of search engine and SEO as explained by Matt Cutts. But still there is a bit amount of gap between both of them. Hence we need to wisely select any of the method based on the exact needs and exact effects what we need.

Thanks for sharing your nice post. I have already learnt here what is difference between domain and sub domain.

Jerry Peres

Thanks for sharing your information with us. I totally agreed with you on sub domain name and sub folder. I think sub folder structure is easy to maintain than a sub domain but there can be various reason to use the sub domain because Google have some conditions.

I disagree with your statement on the more subdomains you have the more pages you'll get indexed in Google. Having a subdomain isn't bad perse but more a separate strategy, like putting keywords in the inner url of a page/post. It can have benefits SEO wise but can also hurt branding depending on the long term goals of the site.

James Thomas

"Thank you for posting such a useful article on the importance of web hosting. Although this article explains out the basic factors for why should we not use sub domain, but it has missed the basic thing that for Google the sub domains are separate domains and they dose not include the basic website URL for that the website does not ranks for that URL, rather the sub domains get its ranks. Moreover it is also to be noted down that if the domain has a very bad past history, then it becomes very difficult to rank this websites. I personally had this problem which was finally recovered due to some extremely helpful SEO guidelines that my partner company gave me. Hence I would like to recommend all of you to contact http://goo.gl/dIRZwL for a free consultation on SEO and any other web design and development practices."

I think the issue of whether to use subdomains or not depends.
For me, I will only use it when creating another version of the site, like the site in another language or something like that. Anything other than that, I will go for subdirectory.

rishi menon

I still have a doubt with one thing
You said that both news.example.com and example.com/news are same.
and what if i have a website with name as examplenews.com
Does that effect my rankings

That makes a lot of sense. If Matt Cuts has confirmed it, then there's no denying the fact that it doesn't make that much of a difference. Go with whatever works best for you. A subdomain gives you many different options, while a subfolder can make setting things up easy if it's already part of your website's CMS.

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Not even knowing what I was doing I started a website that did not even have a so called blog; I simply added content on a regular basis. It produced more business than I ever imagined. I have since discovered that content (in your particular narrow niche) is the key just like this article says.

This is a really awesome post! It answered the questions I had in my mind really well. I was unsure what's the pros and cons of having subdomains. Thanks for this resourceful content when I need it the most. I will stick with subfolder then :)

Thanks for the detailed information. I have been on the fence about creating a Keyword-rich subdomain to help strengthen my main domain; however, I didn't consider the fact that I could be competing with myself. I will give it more thought before proceeding.

A great post to read!!!
This is a really important topic of discussion. And, according to me the only advantage that subfolder blog pages can have is, apart from other blogs these subfolder blog pages will also be interlinked with all the main pages of the website, which will not be possible in subdomain case.

I love the voice that you use for your blog. In the industry so many blogs are just stale and boring. Thanks for giving relevant info with a lively tone. You even follow Inbound best practices with a subtle call to action at the end. Smooth.